Increased Steam Pressure and Temperature
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Page Under Development This page is still “under development”. Please contact Chris Newman at webmaster@5at.co.uk if you would like to help by contributing text to this or any other page.
It may seem counterintuitive that locomotives with smaller driving wheels should achieve higher efficiency than those with larger driving wheels, but it is a fact that high engine rotation rates offer a number of technalogical benefits. It may also seem counterintuitive that long strokes (such as used on GWR 2-cylinder locos) also offer advantages […]
Lack of steam tightness is usually imagined to be associated with steam leaking from pipe joints and piston rod glands resulting in the familiar leaks that can be seen as a white plume of steam eminating from wherever the leak is occurring. Steam leakage of this sort is indeed wasteful and deletarious to a locomotive’s […]
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The concept of the Kordina named after its inventor Zsigmond Kordina (see below), is described on page 153 of Wardale’s book “The Red Devil and Other Tales from the Age of Steam”, its function being to: “expand the release steam to low pressure and high velocity at the point where the exhaust flows from the […]
An “economizer” is a supplementary water heater consisting of the front part of the boiler which is partitioned off from the rear section by a thin steel plate baffle, closely-fitted inside and around (but not rigidly attached to) the boiler barrel, tubes and flues. Thus, the pressure on both sides of the baffle is the […]
The temperature of feedwater entering the boiler should be as high as possible in order to maximize steam production and to minimize thermal stresses in the boiler structure Feedwater heating can be achieved in many ways. The “steam injectors” commonly used on First Generation locomotives provides a degree of preheating, however they only work at […]
Porta’s Water Treatment is an extension of the TIA system that was successfully used in France and the UK in the later days of steam. Porta’s water treatment is claimed to: stop all water-side corrosion; prevent scale formation, even when using the hardest of water; prevent deposition of sludges and thus the need for frequent […]
The application of GPCS or “Gas Producer Combustion System” to locomotive fireboxes is explained in great detail in pages 78 to 92 of Dave Wardale’s book “The Red Devil and Other Tales from the Age of Steam“. Basically it is a 19th century technology involving the blowing of oxygen over heated coal to make “Producer […]
The celebrated Argentinean steam locomotive engineer Livio Dante Porta devised a classification for steam locomotive development as summarized below: First Generation Steam (FGS) – practically all past locomotives; Second Generation Steam (SGS) – new designs incorporating the best proven modern steam locomotive technology; Third Generation Steam (TGS) – totally new formats requiring considerable research and […]
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